Popular writers like Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick, and Margaret Atwood have carved out science fiction and fantasy as areas of literary specialty. Yet the ghost of science fiction’s past lingers in how we construct racial identity. Drawing upon African-American cultural theory and performance studies, Dr. André Carrington will demonstrate how these literary works become part of what he calls “speculative fiction” that curiously creates images of literary “ghettos” inhabited by aliens, robots, ghosts, and others.

Inside these ghettos, we find a world in which black authors and audiences participate to shape images of race, racial identity, and gender in our popular culture and imaginations. What we discover in our exploration of speculative fiction is not only how notions of race and gender are constructed in all forms of popular entertainment but also how it is an incredible and haunting archive of blackness.

As he draws from numerous examples from literature and popular media, Dr. Carrington will explain how his forthcoming book, Through a Lens, Darkly: Blackness in Speculative Fiction and Media, consolidates these claims into the argument that the very work of making distinctions among genres becomes a fundamental part of how we construct racial identity in our collective imagination.

This event is free and open to the Drexel community. Light refreshments will be served.